Literary Experiments and Emotional Catharsis

Preaching to the Uninterested

Atheism, like all isms, tends to bore me every once in a while, although I’m a Radical Atheist — as Douglas Adams once put it, so effectively (as usual). That is why, Richard Dawkin’s sometimes (or almost always, when he’s on about religion) tires me down, especially his evangelical zeal, where he goes around provoking people, to think about issues of God’s (non) existence.

One such example is this comment (I’ve transcribed this from this youtube video):

But I did hope, that people who’re kind of sitting on the fence, who’ve perhaps never thought about it very much, [who] perhaps had better things to do; would think about it, would think for themselves about it, as result of reading my book, and would come off the fence in the direction of Atheism.

Makes me wonder: if people really had better things to do than to think about religion and God, why bother getting them to think about them in the first place? Shouldn’t they just continue to do those better things?

Of course, Dawkin’s reply would be a predictable one: how atheists are routinely marginalized, and how numbers matter in a representative democracy, and so on. And may be there is something to it, too. However, just as overzealous religious evangelism turns the fence-sitters away from religious faith, I suspect same will happen with atheist evangelism.